Despite the hype surrounding ground and air-based automated delivery mechanisms, the surge in home deliveries during the Covid pandemic was largely fulfilled by an enormous increase in human delivery drivers and riders. For instance, in the UK alone, Amazon added around 25,000 new workers to help fulfill the growth in orders seen during the pandemic.
Other companies in the space, such as DoorDash and Grubhub, report similar growth in their workforce as demand for online deliveries of everything from groceries to fashion surged. Research from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute suggests, however, that the surge is unlikely to endure into the post-Covid world.
Short-term change
Indeed, the researchers found that over 90% of people who were frequent users of online delivery services during the pandemic would probably revert back to their usual method of shopping once the pandemic restrictions ease.
“It is likely that the increased use of e-commerce is not the result of market competition, where the most efficient competitor outperforms the others,” the researchers say. “Rather, an external disruption—the pandemic—significantly altered the playing field. Once this external effect is removed, some of the gains made by the delivery services will likely fall off.”
The research found that delivery methods tend to vary considerably, as indeed does the way that consumers use them. The researchers identified four distinct types of users: Non-adopters, prior adopters, temporary new adopters, and permanent new adopters. The delivery services were typically distributed across four classes: food, groceries, home goods, and other items.
Both the initial adoption and then the subsequent intent to continue using delivery services were found to vary depending on the type of goods consumed. For instance, grocery orders had the highest proportion of new users, with the researchers suggesting this was largely due to the boost in delivery of essential items during the pandemic.
Indeed, while the number of users of services like online groceries surged by around 113% during the pandemic, the data suggests that less than half of these new users would continue shopping online after the pandemic.
“Answering these questions is essential to estimate the current and future demand for deliveries,” the authors conclude. “Transportation professionals and researchers have assumed that people would still rely on delivery services even after the COVID crisis is over. However, in reality, consumers’ technology acceptance is much more dynamic and complex during a pandemic than during normal conditions. Understanding these nuanced behaviors is essential for sound transportation policy making.”
